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10/25/2018

BGNE has come in a lot, appropriately. Hard to beat Imbruvica and I think you might need an ionic (standard) binder to change things here. Covalent is covalent, amirite?

Big Revlimid, Soliris, Keytruda and Opdivo numbers. Cancer/Rare disease is eating pharmaceuticals. All the basic necessities of statins, metformin, ARBs, antibiotics have been handled. The pharma industry basically exists to manage the 1%-10% of maladies that create 25-50% of healthcare costs. This is a good place to be. No one wants to die of these nasty illnesses and “greed” can’t come into play when you’ve created the first ever treatment for some rare tumor as opposed to improved dry eye symptoms by 30%.

Maybe VKTX is a long in comparison to MDGL. I remember when VKTX couldn’t find a dollar underneath a couch cushion, but that’s life!

Book Review – She Has Her Mother’s Laugh – Carl Zimmer
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What do we make of “She Has Her Mother’s Laugh”, Carl Zimmer’s latest, and at 600 pages, plumpest work? While ordinarily, I’d say you can skip the theatrics and read Korf’s genetics textbook and keep up with Am J Hum Genet, I still recommend “SHHML” to the layperson and scientist alike.
Zimmer takes disperate fields and has mostly positive results in annealing a reasonable and cohesive narrative that leaves you satisfied. From the history of heredity, which is mostly an exercise in anthropology, and perhaps zoology, Zimmer then tackles the Darwin-Mendel-Lamarck-Galton pre-genetics era with the air of a historian. The problem is that half of this volume is retelling what Gould, Dawkisn and others have already done, and better. There’s far too much “gemmule” and far too little exon.
So why pay attention? First, Zimmer is a tremendous writer. While it took time to finish and synthesize SHHML, there are few moments when the story drugs or is unreadable. Second, Gould is dated: epigenetics, let alone CRISPR, didn’t exist when he was alive. Zimmer impressively weaves bleeding edge advances without temporal distinction. In general, the book moves from the past to the future, but Zimmer prevents SHHML from becoming an encyclopedia by dragging the future backwards and vice versa when appropriate, and by bringing his personal genetics journey into the story to illuminate the science. Unfortunately, this works only to break monotony of what would be a reasonable textbook on the history of genetics–Zimmer feels impersonal and detached. She may have her mother’s laugh, but we never hear the joke.
Another shortcoming is the substantial body of recent advances and basic facets of the subject which are completely left out. We can forgive Zimmer for excising topics like synthetic biology, alternative splicing, vaccines, CART and more, as he’s approaching the limit for a reasonable printing of a somewhat technical subject. This is not Principia Genetica.
Despite this amnesty, Zimmer comes up short when we ventures into a few places, including alternative modes of inheritance. Nodding to the meme, Zimmer nonetheless biopasses prions or any discussion at all of computer science and bioinformatics. Recent papers on algorithms imitating nature and vice versa would have been a nice addition to admittedly already myriad vignettes.
So, occassionally long-winded Zimmer does a great job of explaining sometimes abstract, sometimes concrete and always dense science. We’re left with an awfully preachy and bizarrely placed ending rant on the environment and politics. It would not be a modern mass-market published work without some social justice plea, I suppose. As someone who has made his living off of the subject matter in question, I can’t help but love SHHML. If you’re looking for a modern, up-to-date and reasonably comprehensive history of heredity and genetrics, Zimmer delivers.

Brief Book Review — Molly’s Game – Molly whoever
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This vapid scrawl outlining a classic tail of Hollywood failure never leaves the reader feeling sorry for its protagonist. Molly is a preeminent putative overacheiver who doesn’t realize she’s achieved nothing and is a product of parents who haven’t pushed her hard enough despite believing the opposite. Naive Molly doesn’t understand that going from her demeaning cocktail waitress job to “running the poker game” is not a graduation. The wealth of the men leering at you like a delicious pastry does not change the fact you are objectified. Still, she’s the proud poker princess pushing herself to the pinnacle of … party planning? Inevitably poor Molly involves herself (or vice versa) with organized crime and it all comes crashing down. Fuck Molly and the three hours it took to read this sorry chick flick.

Personal
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Is it okay to have a crush on Chelsea Clinton?

One life goal is to get served with a lawsuit every day. I probably average around one a month. Gotta step it up.

Wealth is massively increasing again. What to do? Sports teams have gotten stupid expensive for assets that do not produce income (unless I’m not in the know). Paintings seem like better investments–sports is eternal in some ways but shifts quite a bit within 50-100 years.

39 thoughts on “10/25/2018”

Did you get mail when you were out of that building for a month ? I got another one back and don’t know why they returned 2 in a row. Also Red Sox are in the World Series and the Yankees aren’t so HA!!!

Wonder what his overall experience in programming is? If he’s a total beginner, then I agree with you about Python. However, if those computers in the prison don’t have more than Notepad, I’d imagine it won’t be as fun.

He’s whining about how some girl makes her money and says she was objectified, and then is a person that pays for them.

This had nothing to do with Bill Clinton. So obsessed with the people that aren’t in the political power. You probably believe Bill is a rapist, when you probably think kavanaugh and Trump is innocent of their rape cases.? Why is Trump some kind do guy that never did wrong?

Oh Jane, get off your virtue signaling high horse. Who do you think you are telling people what to do with their money? You’re no better than everyone else. Everyone in the real world has a price tag, including you. If you even deny that you don’t have a price that you would sell yourself out for, the only fool in the room is obviously you.

Either that or you’re just obviously delusional and need to go crawling back to the asylum that let you loose.

re: ibrutinib, doesn’t seem unreasonable to think someone could engineer something better than what had been discovered several years ago with exquisite knowledge of the structure of btk, computational techniques, etc. in oncology all you need is to be incrementally better, and we will find out in about a year from now with WM.

Improving dry eye symptoms by 30% would be a huge advance. Because so many people suffer from this disease, the total impact could well be greater than a cure for some rare disease that afflicts only a small number of people.
Wish biotech would pay more attention to cures/treatments for various types of connective tissue conditions like osteoarthritis, adult and juvenile enthesitis, tendinitis, bursitis, spondylarthopathies. So many sufferers – long term chronic pain/disability.

All poker books are dated, from Super System on down. Reverse poker strategy and game theory that has developed in the nose bleeds online before black tuesday is best learned situationally through range implications. RunitOnce.com was a good site for theory and situational simulations. I used to play 10/25-25/50 NLHE regularly and higher on occasion. Take a look a short stack, a game that is becoming increasingly popular in Macau

It’s been a while since you were indicted. My life has changed quite a bit since we last spoke. I’m not sure if you remember me; we never got along, but I saw our jibes as good-hearted trolling. I hope you saw it the same way.

I still see your imprisonment as a sign of the corruption of the society we live in and it is undoubtedly impressive that you haven’t devolved into whining and have maintained some sort of grace throughout all of this.

Stay strong. Stay memey.
We still remember you out here & it still sucks outside those walls, if that’s any consolation. 🙂